A Girl, A Lot of Free Time, and A Second Life

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So finding myself alone tonight, I decided to pop open the destination guide and figure out something to do. The phrase “Testis Tour” caught my attention, so I ran right on over to get with the testis.

There are lots of rules for the Testis Tour, but I complied, even though Sunset is not my WL setting of choice.

I hopped up on the tour thingy and chose the audio tour. We flew up and off to the testis. There’s a lottt of tubes up in this.

Immediately I realized I was not in any sort of learning mood tonight. It was made worse when I was told that SPERM WAS FLYING BY MY HEAD.

That’s what the green stuff is.

But I did learn that sperm don’t swim until they’re starting on their way out. Mostly they’re just floating. That’s cool.

There’s a tour for the ovaries too, but I figure I learned enough tonight.

I will say, though, that it’s nice to find places in SL where you can actually learn something. I think I will probably try to visit more of the academic places because you’re never too old to learn something new, and God knows I could use more education in my brain! Maybe not about sperm, but it might come in handy at a trivia night sometime, right?

So Linden Lab rolled out their new SL profiles pages today. I had been playing with the beta one for a bit and essentially it brings a little more social networking into our world. Naturally this is cause for much alarm from some people because they really don’t want to be social. Hey, I get it. I’m not always the most social person either! There are some privacy settings, but not as many as people would like. But maybe some of what I’m going to show here will help you out a little bit.

Okay. First, find your settings. It looks like a wrench.

That’s going to allow you to do pretty much everything you want to do to your profile anyway, so you need to know where to find it. As you can see, you can change your picture, edit your bio, all that good stuff that you used to have to log in world for. Now if you want to handle things while you’re out or at work or you don’t want to log in because someone you dislike is online, you can do it all from the web. I’m going to assume you know how to do all that, so we’ll move on.

Next, go into the Privacy tab.

These settings will allow you to lock things down to a friends list level, but no further than that at the moment. It could change later, but for now, it is what it is. As you can see by my settings, everyone in Second Life can see my wall and post on it, whether they’re on my friends list or not. I did change that to only letting my friends do that, once I thought about it a little more. I have it set that everyone can see the basics of my profile, whether they’re logged into Second Life/the SL website or not. You, of course, may only want friends to see your profile. Of course, if you’re a blogger or a creator, you might not want to have your profile locked that far down, as I expect it might get troublesome. And really, who is THAT flipping important that they have to lock their profile down that hard, am I right??

EDIT: There is a now a JIRA for allowing the option to not let anyone post to your profile.

EDIT AGAIN: It’s been handled! You can choose now to not let ANYONE post on your profile! Linden Lab DOES listen on occasion! 🙂

Now click on the notifications tab, because this is a biggie.

If you don’t want to be spammed to death with in world notifications of people posting on your profile or commenting on your posts TURN IT OFF. That’s right, just clicky click and turn that mess off. I have it set to email me when someone posts on my profile, but I think email notifications are broken anyway, since I haven’t gotten any emails.

I kind of dig the new profile set up. I can post things and comment to others without ever having to see them in world [that social thing, you know], and I can handle my friends list online, which is awesome!

But of course if you just hate this, you don’t want this, you can’t even believe that Linden Lab would want people to be social, you can always just turn off all your notifications, use a third party viewer that still shows old style profiles, and never think about it again. 🙂

It was a quiet night for me in SL. I spent the majority of it sitting on a hammock with someone who has the amazing ability of being able to calm me down. We were both quiet. We were both doing things in other windows and other programs. But every so often, he let me know he was still there. Considering the very “punch someone in the face” mood I was in today, it was exactly what I needed. ♥

I’ve been pretty much thrust into using Viewer 2 the past week or so, after both the Emerald & Rainbow viewers decided that my computer was no longer what they wanted. Seriously? 2 fps is inhumane. I’ve been using the beta 2.1 viewer and although I will probably never take pretty water pictures again, it is speedy and the whole multiple texture layer feature is amazing. I’ve been having a blast with the tattoo layers. After playing around with some, I began thinking “Hey…maybe I could make my own eye makeups.” Sometimes I get tired of not really creating or having skills in SL, and doing makeup is one of my true skills in RL. [This is where my friends chime in and tell me I have many skills and do many things. But don’t believe them. They are biased and that is why I adore them.]

Tonight I was watching one of my favorite makeup artists on YouTube and the thought struck me again. Maybe, just maybe, I could recreate her gorgeous eye makeup in SL. So after asking on plurk how I might go about it, I pulled out the head of an Eloh mod and got to work.

Um. It didn’t quite work.

I’ll post the YouTube video of the makeup at the end of this blog, but the makeup is supposed to be like a summer meadow – blue sky, white clouds, green grass. This is KIND of what I was going for, but not QUITE.

I know there are other designers out there that do great work. My friend Lexi Morgan of Stellar is certainly one of those. I have several of her eye liners and I’m wearing her tattoo lashes, which I just love. [Remember what I said about multiple layers? It’s awesome!] But I would really really love to be able to do some of my own makeups. I think I need to hook my wacom back up because I have a feeling it would be easier with the tablet so I can get the pressure right. It’s a pain having to run up every 2 seconds to change the opacity. We’ll see how it goes.

I’m yawning up a storm, so I’m going to bed. Here’s the video of the summer meadow makeup. If you like this, check out Michelle’s other tutorials. She’s really good at what she does.

Today I decided to do something that I don’t think any of the bloggers that I know have done.

I went to blogging class.

I’ve been in the group for The Learning Experience for a while, but never have attended any of their classes. Why or when I subscribed, I don’t have a clue. But I get notices every day of different classes and events going on. The Learning Experience covers 7 sims and has about 30 employees who do research, teach, etc. The classes are free to go. If the others are like the one today, they take place in voice. Only the instructor speaks in voice, everyone else types.

So I went with semi-new blogger Tristan and after about 30 minutes, we were bored and we left. Well, I left because I was bored. She actually had an excuse. But we were both in agreement that the class wasn’t really for us.

The problem I saw is that the class was not truly geared towards SL blogging. The instructor went on for over 5 minutes on how we should not expect to make money from our blog unless we get famous with something we’ve said and end up on TV. Well, no kidding? Do any SL bloggers EVER expect to truly make money at it? If you do, you might want to reconsider things. LOL

Some of the tips I got from the notecards provided were good, though.

* Write about what you know.* You probably won’t say anything someone else hasn’t, so find your twist on it.* Don’t expect that just because you write, people are going to read it.* Don’t whine that no one is reading you.* If you write it and you’re right, back it up.* If you write it and you’re wrong, apologize.* Find your niche and run with it.

Another thing he mentioned was commitment. Now, he was saying that you have to spend at least half an hour a day, but obviously most SL bloggers aren’t going to do that. But you do have to have some kind of commitment to your blog if you wish to be read. You can’t update randomly once every month or 2 and expect that people are keeping you on their blogrolls or in their heads. Unless you’re popular and people love you just for being you, another blogger will come in and knock you off the radar.

I wish the class had been more for SL bloggers and not for just blogging in general, but what can you do? :-p

This was the first time I’ve taken a class in SL, and it might be something I do again for another subject. But for now, I think I’m going to just keep blogging without class. 😉